Another day where I didn’t get as much done as I’d like to. I uploaded Chris Elford’s set overnight from Cafe Diem a while back to Facebook because Blake Midgette wanted to post it to Super Friends Camp. He’s also going to put that video and mine up on his new WordPress site for SFC. I’m not sure which video I want him to put up but I can’t give him the video until I get the thumb drive back. I want to nag him about getting an mp3 for the SFC show so I can make an album on Last.fm. I’ve been looking at social profile aggregators such as Hi.im, Zooi.ty, Profil.y, and UnHub. Mostly along the lines of getting my name before someone else did, claim-jumping so to speak, so I would have the short URL, ChrisMartin, rather than languish in the time-honored tradition of AOL email, chrismartin33458. Right now, I would say that UnHub looks the best. Card.ly is similar but I suppose better in the sense that it also aggregates contact info.

Twitter news: I continue to pick up followers including a couple that are magic-related (?) as well as two improv tweeps, Made of Bees and a member of the group (troupe?), Molly Buckley.

I signed up for CinchCast so I’m hoping to do interviews with Blake at SFC Sunday and the Last Stag Standing with Kenny Wingle at Gibson’s Tuesday when the winner is announced. CinchCast wants material to be “short and sweet” so I’m envisioning five minute interviews. Probably shoot for an interview with Joe Hafkey at Comedy Night and Jesse Wiley at Art 6.

I’ve got a backlog of video material to download: my rendition of the set I mistakenly didn’t record at either SFC or Cafe Diem which I did on a Saturday, my set from the Last Stag Standing at Europa Cafe on Sunday and Cafe Diem on the following Monday, October 5. Time flies when you’re having fun.

See if I can dredge up another five minutes of timeless material from previous routines for my set at Art 6. I need to go back to the email and find out what time.

One thing about blog entries: it gives you something to do when you’ve got insomnia

Figure out how to get a embeddable blogroll going here. Oops, looks like I can do it with del,iciou.us. Also set up a Flickr badge which photos from my various wacky comedy photos.

Get a photo of me with the Tiki heads.

I found some really good tips on stand-up comedy career advancement on Stage Line which I bookmarked.

Figure out a way to screen out the Mafia Wars announcements on Facebook. I added Robb Loving on the comedians gift app and followed him on Twitter.

Add comedy clubs with which I’m friends.

Yesterday was pretty much a wheel-spinning day. One of the things I wanted to do was to start the Comedians gift app photo album on Facebook but the Java uploader was acting up, When I switched to the simple uploader, that crashed Firefox. I tried ZoneAlarm Pro for free and I couldn’t launch Firefox after I installed it, so that was a waste of time. I did find out that I could use Google calendar with Weebly. I want to create some picture galleries on Weebly such as funny vehicle crashes though I haven’t been impressed from what I’ve seen of of Weebly’s galleries. I looked at several other calenders. 30Boxes looks nice but probably costs money. One thing I want to put on my list of things to do: creating CDs on CreateSpace.

Probably what I should be doing is recreating page by page from the old site, not to mention pulling stuff from Geocities.

I did download PagePlus SE from Serif which has a booklet template so I don’t need Microsoft Word to produce booklets. However, I do need to gather my routines, assemble them, get more ink so I can print them out, get better paper and get some sort of semi-stiff paper for a cover and get a stapler that I can staple them with. Then start handing them out to comedians and at coffee shops.

Is Bring Me the Head of Oprah Winfrey too strong an album title?

Jokes I want to put on Twitter: Now Sarah Palin doesn’t have to go to Hong Kong to see someone’s junk, if I haven’t already. I think I may be suffering from short term memory loss… I think I may be suffering from short term memory loss… “The men who stare at goats” are not the men I worry about.

I got a request from BookFresh for an appointment from their QA people presumably to do a survey but I’m not going to be using them beyond three appointments unless I start making some money. I’m not sure that you can get online bookings from them in any case.

Mail a DVD to Rob Loving. Put him on the comedy gift app. Get him the audio. Edit the show of Super Friends Camp, damnit. Use the photo from MySpace and Super Friends for the gift app. Boy this is disjointed but then so are things in general with my so-called comedy career. One nice thing about using Weebly’s blog is that it doesn’t hang, i.e. slow down when I type. I want to get back into the rhythm of uploading video on a regular basis.

Put up a page with rules for comedy as I’ve discovered them so far. Keep doing small things in the hopes of leading to big things. I got turned down by the Andy Kaufman awards. Write to David Mare-Garland and find out how he did. Retitle the video from the Andy Kaufman awards. Reset the email on Salty Tongue Records Smokin’ Hot Comedy on YouTube. Put up another Stu Baker video tonight on Facebook.

Post Captain O’Brien’s video on Facebook.

I didn’t get as much work done on the web site yesterday, Columbus Day, because I did the flyer/poster above for Blake Midgette and Super Friends Camp. Sunday, I finished filling out my information for Card.ly and embedded it on the site. I signed up for BookFresh and filled out the information. BookFresh has a cool mini-site that comes free with your account but they limit the number of appointments/events to three, which doesn’t present a problem right now because I usually top out at that number of appearances any way. The solution I suppose would be to figure out a way to embed Google calendar or some such when I go over that. I replaced my Weebly RSS feed for Twitter with the Twitter widget because the Weebly version of the Twitter feed is pretty lame.

On my list of things to do is to sign up with Google AdSense though I doubt I’ll make any money from them. Figure out what the Read more Break element means in Weebly. I’m falling behind on uploading video. I’m overloaded in terms of projects though that might lead to better things in the long run. Overloaded in terms of too much information, too many opportunities and things I want to do. I’m hoping to get a handle on projects by using Todoist to track things. If you believe Robert Fritz, the way to make progress is to make incremental changes and also to stretch.

I’d like to get more into putting on events but I doubt I have the resources to do so. I’d like to put more effort into promoting Last.fm. I’d like to put out some CDs using CreateSpace. I’d like to start publishing a book. I’d like to take the documentary series, “Smokin Hot,” to another level. I’d like to put some pages on the web site devoted to the above. One thing I may be able to do is to publish a PDF even if I don’t have the money for regular printing. Or I could try going through Lulu. But I haven’t even been able to find the time to gather all my routines together yet. Or publishing them on the web site, though I did make a start on www.ChrisMartin.name.

One question is whether I’ve got enough money in my budget to buy PrintShop. Probably it would be a good idea to wait until next month. In the mean time, I could use Serif Publisher’s free version and cough up $10 for the more advanced version next month and then move on to Print Shop the following month after I’ve proved that I’m not just into buying software for sake of accumulating software, which I’ve been guilty of in the past. At least I have used PhotoPlus. Can you use PhotoShop filters with PhotoPlus? The answer is yes. If I had more time, I’d collect them. As it is, I barely use the ones built in. Basically what’s I’m using PhotoPlus is improving levels, doing work with graphics I couldn’t do in LogoCreator like warping and deforming.The possibility of going on the road with several other comedians.

One question I’m interested in is on-line promotion of personal brand and the possibility of exponential growth. At one point does recognition kick in?

Right now, I still don’t have any clear favorites: Weebly, Yalo, Jimdo or Webnode. I’m doing this in Weebly mainly because I started with Weebly and it seems to be the best blogging platform on this sort of website creation tool (I’m not sure what the correct term is). It’s amazing to see how far web site creation has come since the days of GeoCities, now in it’s last days.

One bump in the road: I just heard from Microsoft that my Microsoft Office is not authentic — it failed the validation test. Which is weird since it passed a previous test to get on the Windows Live backup. I went ahead and uninstalled Office — partly to do the right thing, partly to recover more space on my hard drive. I can’t say that it’s going to have much of an impact. I probably was using 80 percent of what I could. I used Word mostly for writing and printing out routines. I also liked the Avery Wizard in conjunction with Word to print out business cards, postcards and flyers for stand-up and occasionally, Microsoft Publisher but I suspect I can replace Publisher’s functionality with PrintShop. I bought Ashampoo’s Office 2008 for all of $5,mostly to replace Word. It doesn’t have the booklet printing capability of Word but it does output PDFs and there’s an online tool that will output booklets from PDFs. Avery has an online business card tool and of course Print Shop does as well. I’d also like to get business cards printed to promote Salty Tongue Records. There are at least four places I could distribute those.

Right now, I’m suffering from too much information or information overload . I’ve tried to get more organized and structured by using Markadee.com. Unfortunately, Markadee has developed a habit of spinning its wheels when you check off an achievement so I’ve gone looking for a backup. At least I can use Markadee as a starting point. Unfortunately Nozbe doesn’t have the kind of layout I wasn’t looking for though it has some other nice features. Right now, Todoist.com looks to my best best. Remember the Milk has a lot of features but the interface doesn’t do it for me. I tried TaDa but gave up shortly. I’ve stuck with Markadee but it hasn’t gotten cumbersome without the ability to make sublists. Maybe I’ll look at the project planning tools on Facebook, whatever that online apps site is with the funny name.

I’d also like to see if Weebly supports a calendar widget or page.

This is my second attempt to build a web site for my stand-up comedy. My first effort was using Visual Site Designer and uploading the site via FTP. Visual Site Designer from Coffee Cup was problematic because there’s no way to maintain consistency of pages. In other words, all pages aren’t updated. Nor is there a navigation bar that’s updated.

Then I switched to Serif’s WebPlus 10. WebPlus was better because when you added or subtracted a page, the navigation bar updated automatically. But positioning subpages was tricky. And while the themes allowed a certain amount of visual consistency, it also meant a lot of tweaking, particularly of columns. Weebly’s two columns dealie is a lot easier to handle and the theme is consistent throughout without any adjustment on my part, which allows me to concentrate on content.

Also, WebPlus 10 is not WYSWIG when it comes to placing audio and video on pages, which is frustrating, whereas Weebly is. Maybe the latest version of WebPlus is WYWIG, but that would mean shelling out $30-$40 more to find out and Weebly is free. In some respects, you get more control with WebPlus but that comes at the price of a more complex interface. Updating with WebPlus is slower because that involves FTPing the entire backup file to the web site.

WebPlus 10 is a generation behind the web in terms of features, which is a long time in web time. The blog feature runs through Serif and is not well-implemented and feature-poor. It’s annoying to have to start over again but at least I have a framework from which to build on.

Using Weebly also allows me to bypass Godaddy’s annoying top of the page ads. The only advantage WebPlus has is that it allows the embedding of audio on the page but even that comes with the inability to place it accurately, so I’m not willing to put out with the other drawbacks of WebPlus just for that feature.

Right now, Weebly is at the top of my list but I’m also going to take a look at Yola, Webnode and Jimdo. Obviously, it doesn’t make sense to maintain four different web sites long term, both in terms of time consumption and simplicity, but the only way to find out which is better is to try them. Yola is the only other that allows using your own web site for free so it’s a top contender among the also-rans. It has a slightly diffeifferent feature set than Weebly. I also looked at Wix, but that’s entirely Flash-based.

Weebly is actually better than Yahoo’s web site builder, which costs $13 a month, has more features, and is more tightly integrated. It’s editor also runs faster than Yahoo!, which would even aYahoo! has some industrial strength products you can use with their site builder like Gallery and Six Apart and Typepad blogs but they’re bolted on. In terms of ease of use and feature set, Weebly is up there with SquareSpace, which also cost $13 a month, and way overpriced when it came to bandwidth. Weebly has more and better themes and SquareSpace can be buggy. SquareSpace is deep in some areas but shallow in others.

I’ve used WordPress as a quasi-CMS/web site but I’ve had problems with it running on Godaddy. Some features don’t work entirely like the editor. Plug-ins are both the strength and weakness of WordPress.